Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Announcing The Unicode Standard, Version 6.2

Version 6.2 of the Unicode Standard is now available. This version adds only a single character, the newly adopted Turkish Lira sign; however, the properties and behaviors for many other characters have been adjusted. Emoji and pictographic symbols now have significantly improved line-breaking, word-breaking and grapheme cluster behaviors. The script categorizations for some characters are improved and better documented.

The Unicode Collation Algorithm has been greatly enhanced for Version 6.2, with a major overhaul of its documentation. There have also been significant changes to the collation weight tables, including improved handling of tertiary weights for characters with decompositions, and changed weights for some pictographic symbols.

The newly encoded Turkish Lira sign, like other currency symbols, is expected to be heavily used in its target environment. The Unicode Consortium accelerated the release of Unicode 6.2, to accommodate the urgent need for this character.

For more details of this release, see http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.2.0/.